Prognosis good for doctor's stories

Giller-winning Lam book selling briskly

That's how Ben McNally characterizes the success of Vincent Lam's
Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures in the wake of its winning
the 2006 Giller Prize for excellence in English-language fiction.

McNally, the highly respected manager of Nicholas Hoare Ltd.,
one of Toronto's busiest independent booksellers, had only 10
copies of the book in stock going into the weekend and expected
to have sold most of these by today. Before Lam took the $40,000
prize two weeks ago, McNally had sold "maybe 20 copies."
Afterward? More than 80.

It's a phenomenon being repeated across the country, but most
intensely in Ontario. And luckily Random House Canada, the parent
company of Lam's Toronto- based publisher Doubleday Canada, seems
to be up to the demand. In the last 13 days, Random House president
Brad Martin has ordered four reprints of the $17. 95 trade paperback
from Transcontinental Printing in Louisville, Que.. The first
order, for 20,000 copies, was, in fact, called in the night of
the Giller win, followed the next morning by an order for an additional
20,000.

As a result, there are now 115,000 copies of Bloodletting &
Miraculous Cures in print, Martin estimates, including the two
orders, of 30,000 and 20, 000, he approved last week. "Certainly
it's the hottest-selling Giller book I've been associated with,
and I've done a few," he said.

McNally agreed. "I think it's going to be really big, and
I don't think it's going to stop for quite a while." Laurie
Greenwood, an Edmonton independent book retailer, was almost as
bullish. "This is one Giller that will sell," she said,
noting that before Lam won the 13th Giller Prize, she'd sold only
three copies of his book. Now she's selling as many as 10 a day
-- or was, that is, until last Wednesday, when she sold out and
had to order 35 more. "Probably I didn't order enough,"
she said Friday.

What perhaps makes the hubbub all the more impressive is that
it's for a debut book by a largely unknown author -- and for a
book of short stories at that. When he's not writing, Lam, 32,
is an emergency-room physician at Toronto East General Hospital.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, his 12 linked stories in Bloodletting
& Miraculous Cures are a classic instance of the old admonition
"write what you know." In this case, it's the intertwined
lives of four University of Toronto medical-school graduates,
from their days as students to full-fledged practitioners.

On Nov. 10, Lam's agent, Anne McDermid, announced that rights
had been sold for a TV series based on the book, and last week
an auction began for a rights sale to a U.S. publisher.

Bloodletting & Miraculous Cures began its existence last
January as a $29. 95 hardcover, with a modest print-run of 4,000.
Traditionally, a publisher likes to wait 10 months to a year before
a hardcover is released in the cheaper paperback edition -- but
in this instance, Random House and Doubleday decided to go the
paperback route in late September, just after the Lam had been
included among the 15 titles on the Giller Prize long list. Ten
thousand copies were printed then, with another 5,000 ordered
in October when the collection was named as one of the Giller's
five finalists.